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Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

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Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#181

Post by halfmatthalfcat »

qudat wrote: post #177
flumpcakes wrote: post #130

> There's a new programmable layer of abstraction to master (in addition to the usual layers below) involving agents, subagents, their prompts, contexts, memory, modes, permissions, tools, plugins, skills, hooks, MCP, LSP, slash commands, workflows, IDE integrations, and ... This sounds unbearable. It doesn't sound like software development, it sounds like spending a thousand hours tinkering with your vim config. It…

As far as I can tell as a heavy coding agent user: you don’t need to know any of this and that’s a testament to how good code agent TUIs have become. All I do to be productive with a coding agent is tell it to break a problem down into tasks, store it inside beads, and then make sure each step is approved by me. I also add in a TDD requirement where it needs to build tests that fail then eventually pass. Everything e…

This sounds like my complete and utter nightmare. No art or finesse in building the thing - only an exercise in torturing language to someone who at a fundamental level doesn't understand a thing.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#182

Post by layer8 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #81
Q6T46nT668w6i3m wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s wild that programmers are willing to accept less determinism.

It's wild that management would be willing to accept it. I think that for some people it is harder to reason about determinism because it is similar to correctness, and correctness can, in many scenarios be something you trade off - for example in relation to scaling and speed you will often trade off correctness. If you do not think clearly about the difference with determinism and other similar properties like (rea…

Management is used to nondeterminism, because that’s what their employees always have been.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#183

Post by moffkalast »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #104
superze wrote: post #40

As an Opus user, I genuinely don’t understand how someone can work for weeks or months without regularly opening an IDE. The output almost always fails. I repeatedly rewrite prompts, restate the same constraints, and write detailed acceptance criteria, yet still end up with broken or non-functional code.its very frustrating to say the least Yesterday alone I spent about $200 on generations that now require significan…

I hardly ever open an IDE anymore. I use Claude Code and Cursor. What I do: - use statically typed languages: TypeScript, Go, Rust, Python w/ types - Setup linters. For TS I have a bunch of custom lint rules (authored by AI) for common feedback that I've given. ( https://github.com/shepherdjerred/monorepo/tree/main/package... ) - For Cursor, lots of feedback on my desired style. https://github.com/shepherdjerred/scou…

> make at least 20 searches to online documentation

Lol sometimes I have to spend two turns convincing Claude to use its goddamn search and look up the damn doc instead of trying to shoot from the hip for the fifth time. ChatGPT at least has forced search mode.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#184

Post by llmslave2 »

jennyholzer3 wrote: post #172
llmslave2 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be genuinely useful in 5 years, my issue is how it's being marketed now. We're 6 months into "AI will be writing 90% of code in three months" among other ridiculous statements.

I don't mean to be inflammatory but I am not at all convinced that LLMs will be useful for software development in 5 years! I think LLMs are very well marketed but I don't think they're very good at writing code and I don't think they've gotten better at it!

I sort of agree. If anything I feel like they've gotten a bit worse, but the advances in the tooling around them (eg claude code) has masked that slightly.

I think they are useful as an augmentation, but largely valueless for directly outputting code. Who knows if that will change. It's still made me more productive as a dev despite not oneshotting entire files. It's just not industry-changing, at least yet.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#185

Post by merlincorey »

simonw wrote: post #163
jefffoster wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a guess an Enterprise API account. Pay per token but no limits. It’s very easy to spend $100s per dev per day.

The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either - they have an overage fee you can pay now in Claude Code so once you've expended your rate limited token allowance you can keep on working and pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up.

> The $200/month plan doesn't have limits either... once you've expended your rate limited token allowance... pay for the extra tokens out of an additional cash reserve you've set up

You're absolutely right! Limited token allowance for $200/month is actually unlimited tokens when paying for extra from a cash reserve which is also unlimited, of course.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#186

Post by threeducks »

bgwalter wrote: post #122

This is from the man who has no finished open source projects and who recommended camera-only FSD to Tesla, which he also did not finish. The actually productive programmers, who wrote the stack that powers the economy before and after 2023 need not listen to these cheap commercials.

> This is from the man who has no finished open source projects

To be fair, which open source project can really claim that it is "finished", and what does "finished" even mean?

The only projects that I can truly call "finished" are those that I have laid to rest because they have been superseded by newer technologies, not because they have achieved completeness, because there is always more to do.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#187

Post by nzoschke »

simonw wrote: post #100
rambojohnson wrote: post #58

What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…

I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…

Right there with you.

I'm instructing my agents to doing old school boring form POST, SSR templates, and vanilla JS / CSS.

I previously shifted away from this to abstractions because typing all the boilerplate was tedious.

But now that I'm not typing, the tedious but simple approach is great for the agent writing the code, and great for the the people doing code reviews.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#188

Post by mannanj »

roadside_picnic wrote: post #160
simonw wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think AI-assisted programming may be having the opposite effect, at least for me. I'm now incentivized to use less abstractions. Why do we code with React? It's because synchronizing state between a UI and a data model is difficult and it's easy to make mistakes, so it's worth paying the React complexity/page-weight tax in order for a "better developer experience" that allows us to build working, reliable software…

> If an LLM is typing that code - and it can maintain a test suite that shows everything works correctly - maybe we don't need that abstraction after all. I've had plenty of junior devs justify massive code bases of random scripts and 100+ line functions with the same logic. There's a reason senior devs almost always push back on this when it's encountered. Everything hinges on that "if". But you're baking a tautolog…

> things will break and when they do, it will incur a world of pain

How much if this is still true and exaggerated in our world environment today where the cost of making things is near 0?

I think “Evolution” would say that the cost of producing is near 0 so the possibility of creating what we want is high. The cost of trying again is low so mistakes and pain aren’t super high. For really high stakes situation (which most situations are not) bring the expert human in the loop until the expert better than that human is AI.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#189

Post by reconnecting »

9dev wrote: post #158
reconnecting wrote: post #79

> OpenAI's sales and marketing expenses increased to _$2 billion_ in the first half of 2025. Looks like AI companies spend enough on marketing budgets to create the illusion that AI makes development better. Let's wait one more year, and perhaps everyone who didn't fall victim to these " slimming pills ” for developers' brains will be glad about the choice they made.

Well. I was a sceptic for a long time, but a friend recently convinced me to try Claude Code and showed me around. I revived an open source project I regularly get back to, code for a bit, have to wrestle with toil and dependency updates, and loose the joy before I really get a lot done, so I stop again. With Claude, all it took to fix all of that drudge was a single sentence. In the last two weeks, I implemented sev…

This sounds to me like a lack of resource management, as tasks that junior developers might perform don't match your skills, and are thus boring.

As a creator of an open-source platform myself, I find trusting a semi-random word generator in front of users unreliable.

Moreover, I believe it creates a bad habit. I've seen developers forget how to read documentation and instead trust AI, and of course, as a result AI makes mistakes that are hard to debug or provokes security issues that are easy to overlook.

I know this sounds like a luddite talking, but I'm still not convinced that AI in its current state can be reliable in any way. However, because of engineers like you, AI is learning to make better choices, and that might change in the future.

Re: Karpathy on Programming: “I've never felt this much behind”

#190

Post by dandanua »

rambojohnson wrote: post #58

What exhausts me isn’t “falling behind.” It’s watching the profession collectively decide that the solution to uncertainty is to pile abstraction on top of abstraction until no one can explain what’s actually happening anymore. This agentic arms race by C-suite know-nothings feels less like leverage and more like denial. We took a stochastic text generator, noticed it lies confidently, wipes entire databases and hard…

Don't forget you are expected to deliver x10 for the same pay, "because you have the AI now".
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